Friday, April 05, 2013

I went to a groovy coffee shop the other day. Prayer flags.
A wall dedicated to poor children, smiling toothily (or not) in photos, serving
as an advertising prop to sell accessories in which the gimmick is assuring the
consumer that the merchandizer will shift some of the ready, or an inkind
equivalent, to the kids. Smiley clean moral people behind the counter. So there
I am, and suddenly I feel an advent of that futile senile anger that I am sure
I will spend years expressing. I become, in a word, more Walter Sobjackish – so after
ordering a latte and a drip, I point to a camera high on the wall behind the
cashier, under which there is a smiley face and the words, smile, you’re on
camera, and I ask her whether she felt the slogan was a way of making us feel
actually happy about losing our basic freedom not to be surveilled or watched.
These words came out of my mouth, I am sure, in good order, nary a messup in
syntax, but the woman’s face (she was probably nineteen) showed utter
incomprehension. Then her companion, of about the same age, decided it was just
that I didn’t understand the sign, and told me that it was like we could all
pretend to be movie stars. I however thought that this didn’t quite grapple
with my off the cuff critique, and so pointed out that it is by such delusions
that we lose our basic freedoms. And then, not wanting to be a total jerk (the
spirit of senile anger leaving my shoulder, I guess), I conceded that there was
nothing we could do about it, so what the hay. I got my latte and the drip, and
the woman then resolutely turned to the next customer, hoping that he, at
least, was not a jerk.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Conrad was a logistics man before he was an author. Unlike
Melville, whose sea experience, as Charles Olson notes, was in an assembly line
– in as much as the whale was caught, cut up, and its oil extracted on board
ship – Conrad sailed with the middle men, the truckers and dealers. This
experience within a small node of the greater global market system made Conrad
sensitive to both the pre-capitalist mentality – which lent its aura of romance
to the seaman – that the dealer was constantly in contact with in the far
places of the earth, and one of the fundamental facts of capitalism – the dominance
of exchange. Everything turns into money in the system – everything is
fungible. In actual fact, pre-capitalist notions pervaded, and still pervade,
the system. When pure capitalism penetrates a certain a-capitalist level, the
level of more complicated exchanges, it undermines itself, for capitalism is
parasitic on the economies it supposedly supercedes.

The x marks the spot where the inhuman fungibility of the
capitalist ideal encounters the redoubt of the a-capitalist mentality is the treasure trove. Treasure
– whether it is the miser’s hoard or the pirate’s chest – was much on the mind
of Conrad’s colleagues in the later 19th century. In the contention
between Henry James and Stevenson over the art of the novel, treasure becomes –
I think not accidentally – the symbol of their difference:

Mr. James refers, with singular generosity of praise, to a
little book about a quest for hidden treasure; but he lets fall, by the way,
some rather startling words. In this book he misses what he calls the
“immense luxury” of being able to quarrel with his author. The luxury, to
most of us, is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a
billow, and only to awake, and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the
piece is over and the volume laid aside. Still more remarkable is Mr.
James’s reason. He cannot criticise the author, as he goes, “because,” says
he, comparing it with another work, “I have been a child, but I have
never been on a quest for buried treasure.” Here is, indeed, a wilful
paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be
demonstrated that he has never been a child. There never was a child
(unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military
commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered
shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly
retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and
beauty. Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent
reason against too narrow a conception of experience; for the born artist, he
contends, the “faintest hints of life” are converted into revelations; and it
will be found true, I believe, in a majority of cases, that the artist writes
with more gusto and effect of those things which he has only wished to do, than
of those which he has done. Desire is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah
the best observatory. Now, while it is true that neither Mr. James nor
the author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone
questing after gold, it is probable that both have ardently desired and fondly
imagined the details of such a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author,
counting upon that, and well aware (cunning and low-minded man!) that this
class of interest, having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible
and beaten road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout
to the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Character
to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide
trousers and a liberal complement of pistols. The author, for the sake of
circumstantiation and because he was himself more or less grown up, admitted
character, within certain limits, into his design; but only within certain
limits. Had the same puppets figured in a scheme of another sort, they
had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this elementary novel of
adventure, the characters need to be presented with but one class of
qualities—the warlike and formidable. So as they appear insidious in
deceit and fatal in the combat, they have served their end. Danger is the
matter with which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it
idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the
sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear.”

In fact, James – Stevenson could have replied – certainly did
write about treasure. What else are the Spoils of Poynton? What are the Aspern
Papers? And what – to go into a later novel – is Adam Verver doing in The
Golden Bowl, if not treasure hunting?

The treasure has certain characteristics that signal its
archaic status, its connection to the economic world of the limited good – to use
George Foster’s term from his article, Peasant Society and the Image of the
Limited Good, which – without Foster knowing anything about George Bataille’s
work – gets a crucial dynamic in the closed world preceding capitalism. This is
the notion that wealth is, centrally, something taken from the common pile. It
is thus already an act of violence, best sealed by keeping quiet about it. The
hesitation that we still feel about “telling your business” derives from the
idea that your business is obscurely wrested from someone else’s – that, at the
very least, it steals from someone else’s luck. Nostromo is in a sense an x ray
of the clash of different fundamental economic notions. It is a clash that is
associated, by historic necessity, with colonization and decolonization. Like Kurz’s
horde of ivory, the horde of silver that lies at the center of the actions
around which the narrative takes shape is something wrenched out of the world
system, dialectically negating the very system that gives the material worth.

George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite (1883), gives
another, Marxist interpretation of one of the great nineteenth century treasure
narratives: the Ring of the Nibelungen. He takes Wagner’s treatment of the
Nibelungen horde as a kind of Hegelian motif that organizes a gloss on the
history of modern Europe. It is the history of the rise of the Plutonic
kingdom. Too easily, Shaw adopts the idea of the natural economy, one of
primitive communism, which effaces the intricacies of the image of the limited
good, and thus the cursed sense of treasure, in the peasant economy. Balzac and
Marx could have told him better. But he does capture a second aspect of
treasure which is echoed, both rhetorically and thematically, in Nostromo – the
mysterious power of capital, viewed as a treasure, over human life:

Let me assume for a moment that you are a
young and good-looking woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at
Klondyke five years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to
leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them, enjoying
with perfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no human being
will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that
frame of mind the golden age will endure.

Now suppose a man
comes along: a man who has no sense of the golden age, nor any power of living
in the present: a man with common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like
most of the men you know. Suppose you reveal to that man the fact that if he
will only pluck this gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men, driven
by the invisible whip of hunger, will toil underground and overground night and
day to pile up more and more gold for him until he is master of the world! You
will find that the prospect will not tempt him so much as you might imagine,
because it involves some distasteful trouble to himself to start with, and
because there is something else within his reach involving no distasteful toil,
which he desires more passionately; and that is yourself. So long as he is
preoccupied with love of you, the gold, and all that it implies, will escape
him: the golden age will endure. Not until he forswears love will he stretch
out his hand to the gold, and found the Plutonic empire for himself. But the
choice between love and gold may not rest altogether with him. He may be an
ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous
and despicable to you. In that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly
humiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love he
can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that, he will make
short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting its lost thoughtlessness
and sweetness.

In this sense, Nostromo as a character is
the negative image of Alberic, Wagner’s dwarf, who steals the Rhine gold from
the Rhine maidens. He is, instead, handsome, brave, and notoriously generous.
And yet he defies Shaw’s rather smug psychology. Once treasure is introduced
into the world, it is not merely the malformed, in a transvaluation of values,
who glom onto it and begin the process of inoculating society with the desire
for exchange in itself. Rather it is, at least in Nostromo’s case, the well
formed who, inadequately equipped with an outmoded code of honor, are captured
bythe power of treasure, even as they
are forced into the shadow side of capitalism. Shaw’s interpretation of the Rhine
gold is, as far as it goes, revelatory; but it all too quickly dissolves the
difference between treasure, in the form of gold, and capital, in the form of
money. This transformation is fraught with more magic than Shaw can accommodate:

In due time the
gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great cities of the world. But the
old dilemma will keep continually reproducing itself. The man who will turn his
back on love, and upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself
single-heartedly to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic
powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch. But few men will
make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until the Plutonic power is so strongly
set up that the higher human impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even
the mere appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot purchase
their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits driven to build their
lives upon riches. How inevitable that course has become to us is plain enough
to those who have the power of understanding what they see as they look at the
plutocratic societies of our modern capitals.

Conrad was not satisfied with the
character of Nostromo. He was unhappy about the last two chapters, in which
Nostromo becomes more and more like Alberic. And one feels, in reading the
novel, that Nostromo is a creature who is explained into being before he exists
as a palpability. He is always too spurred, too … operatic. Conrad only hits
upon Nostromo as a solid existence to be explained, instead of an explanation
to be solidified, when, two thirds of the way through the book, Nostromo begins
to confront the Plutocratic society that Costaguana, as the Republic of
Occidente, has become – with himselfunconsciously aiding the process. He, in other words, experiences a
genuine raising of consciousness: he becomes conscious of class as an economic
fact.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.